One Knight in Product One Knight in Product

Aakash Gupta is a product leader turned author and professional newsletter writer, with a huge following on LinkedIn and Twitter. He writes regularly on product management principles, and personal and career growth and recently put out an article about nailing the product leadership job search. We also recently collaborated on an article about fractional product leadership! In this interview, I spoke to Aakash about his journey into full-time content creation and some of the lessons he learned about the product leadership job search.
Episode highlights:
 
1. The product leadership job market is slowly coming back to life
It's been tough out there, and loads of amazing people have been laid off and struggled to find new roles. Some might doubt they'll ever get another job again! But there are good and great jobs available if you know where to look.
2. Many of the best jobs aren't advertised in public and relationshps are everything
There's a "dark web" of networking and personal relationships, without which you might struggle to get introduced to some of the jobs. At the highest level, the majority of jobs are not posted publicly. Whether you like it or not, you need to play the game and build strategic relationships with boutique recruiters and especially investors.
3. You need to prioritise the type of job you want and it's not all about money
Most people are trying to optimise for something in their new job. Maybe it's a big pay packet. Maybe it's a mission they believe in. Maybe it's the stage of company, influence and impact. There's no wrong answer, but make sure you know what you're getting yourself into and what success looks like.
4. Try to make your career look linear to land the role you want
Many of us have squiggly careers and we've bounced between industries or types of company. This is fine, but if you're looking to get a job in a particular niche then you need to optimise your career narrative to tell a story about why YOU are the person for that niche.
5. Many leaders are still biased towards Big Tech employees, but you can beat the odds
Some founders or business leaders will always prioritise someone with a stellar name on their CV, and this can leave people who have worked for lesser-known companies feeling adrift. However, you can take a strategic view of your job search, outwork and outsmart your competition.
Contact Aakash
You can catch up with Aakash on LinkedIn, or Twitter or check out his newsletter.

Related episodes you should like:

Connecting Product Management to Business Goals by Mastering your Product Strategy (Gabrielle Bufrem, Product Leadership Coach & Advisor)
Moving Beyond Founder-Led Product Development & Setting PMs up for Success (Jennifer Yang-Wong, VP of Product @ Contrary)
How to Build Products when the Founder IS the Product (Saagar Bains, Fractional Product Leader & Former Head of Product @ The Body Coach)
Landing That Perfect Role by Finding Your Inevitable Edge (Erika Klics, Job Search Strategist & Founder @ ErikaKlics.com)
Supporting the Next Generation of Female Product Managers with Women in Product UK (Namrata Sarmah, Founder @ Women in Product UK & CPO @ INTO)
Making our Product Teams Stronger through Building Communities of Practice (Petra Wille, Author "Strong Product People" and "Strong Product Communities")
Nils Davis's Hot Take - Product Managers Need to Tell Better Stories on Their Resumes (Nils Davis, Resume Coach & Go-to-Market Consultant @ Confidence & Impact LLC)
Transforming your Organisation to the Product Operating Model (Marty Cagan, Author "Inspired", "Empowered" and "Transformed")

Nils Davis is a resume coach who wants product managers to realise they're AMAZING, and help others realise it too.
His hot take? That the majority of product managers are doing themselves a disservice by producing resumes that simply list a bunch of tasks that pretty much all product managers have done.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time at https://www.oneknightinproduct.com/hot
Visit Nils's site: https://perfectpmresume.com/Nils on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nilsdavis/

John Cutler is a systems overthinker, product educator and author of "The Beautiful Mess" newsletter.
His hot take? That the Instagram-ification of product management sets unrealistic standards, and is driving us all crazy.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
 
 

Debbie Levitt is a UX and CX consultant, the author of a few books, including "Customers Know You Suck" and runs a thriving community of UX professionals.
Her hot take?
That if we are all fine doing each other's jobs (and maybe not doing them well) then AI can do all of our jobs today.
Also available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lT5IBKsIE-E&ab_channel=OneKnightinProduct
 

Melissa Perri is the renowned author of "Escaping the Build Trap" and a well-known product consultant and educator. She has worked for a long time with Denise Tilles, another seasoned product leader, with whom she has been evangelising Product Operations to help scale product companies effectively. They recently collaborated on a book, coincidentally called "Product Operations", and we spoke all about the story behind the book and the themes within it.

Saeed Khan and I are planning a new course - please give us your feedback!
The relationship between product management and sales teams is traditionally tricky, and a common complaint from B2B PMs. Saeed Khan and I are looking to help with this with an online course and we'd love your feedback on your relationship with sales. This will help shape the course and, if you want to take part when the course is ready, we'll give you a special discount.
Please fill in the survey here. Thanks!

Episode highlights:
 
1. Product Operations is about helping product managers make faster, better-quality decisions
It's important to dispel the myth of multi-armed product managers who can just do everything. There's too much for everyone to do! This creates barriers to doing great product management work and pulls product managers away from doing the real, value-add product management work that they're judged on.
2. There are three pillars of product operations...
The three pillars are ways to think about how to organise enablement. They are "Business & Data Insights", "Customer & Market Insights" and "Process and Practices". They are all the foundation of good product decision-making, and all companies will have a certain level of maturity already.
3. ... But you don't need to build all the pillars all at once
You don't need to fix everything at once. If you already have good capabilities in one or more areas, fix the ones that you don't have good capabilities in! You don't need to boil the ocean, just find the biggest gaps and opportunities to improve, and start to work on them.
4. Process shouldn't be seen as a dirty word
There's such a thing as too much process but, even if you don't call it process or try to define it, all work involves a process. It's important to have people to oversee the process at scale, prevent duplication or rework, and make sure that process is right-sized rather than ever-expanding.
5. The first step is being honest about your current state
There are plenty of ways to go with product operations as you scale, but the most important thing is being really honest with yourself about what your most important limiting factors are, what your product managers are spending time on and what's going to work for you.
Check out "Product Operations"
"Many companies want to reap the benefits of economies of scale that comes with being a product-led company. As our businesses change shape to focus more on software, so do our ways of working. We need to make sure we’re breaking down these silos of information and capabilities that arise at scale. To react quickly and set great Product Strategies, leaders and team members alike need access to high-quality data and a process to implement their decisions."
Check it out on Amazon or the book website.
Check out "Escaping the Build Trap"
"To stay competitive in today’s market, organizations need to adopt a culture of customer-centric practices that focus on outcomes rather than outputs. Companies that live and die by outputs often fall into the "build trap," cranking out features to meet their schedule rather than the customer’s needs. In this book, Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals. "
Check it out on Amazon.
Contact Melissa & Denise
You can catch up with Melissa at melissaperri.com, check out https://productinstitute.com or follow her on LinkedIn.
You can catch up with Denise at denisetilles

Hope Gurion is a seasoned product coach and one of Marty Cagan's recommendations from his new book, "Transformed". Hope also works closely with Teresa Torres, teaching continuous discovery, as well as working directly with incoming product leaders to help them make an impact in their organisations. We spoke all about knowing your customers, gathering evidence, and whether continuous discovery is really a threat to user researchers.
Episode highlights:
 
1. Product coaching is more than just being there to ask good questions
When working with incoming product leaders, potentially without a product background at all, it's important to have a coach who has product experience who can help you identify your weaknesses, assess the state of play and provide actionable advice. Ultimately, it's important to empower the coachee.
2. It's really hard to make decisions if you have no idea who your customers are
It's important to define who your target customer is and what are their key attributes. This could be demographics, firmographics or whatever characteristics you need to know who you most need to learn from to calibrate your decisions as a product team. But, too many product teams end up resorting to proxies in other functions who "know the customers".
3. Many leaders are overconfident, but evidence is everything
Some people are just naturally confident about everything and can react badly if their ideas are challenged. But, as product people, we absolutely need to look beyond innate confidence and work out what informed the perspective. Which customers are we basing it on? Can I speak to some of those customers? It's not about trashing people's ideas but moving forward with confidence.
4. It's important to get comfortable with making bets and understanding the difference between one-way and two-way-door decisions
Sometimes teams get stuck into cycles of trying to do "perfect research", possibly because they're afraid that they're only going to get one shot at it. This means that they end up not making any moves at all, and everyone ends up getting frustrated at the amount of time product teams take to do anything.
5. Continuous discovery is about removing as many blind spots as possible and probably isn't responsible for mass user research lay-offs
All teams have an imperfect understanding of their product, the pain points associated with their product and their customers. Continuous discovery helps address this by removing blind spots but doesn't aim for perfection - simply evidence about how to make your next move. Is it contributing to user researcher lay-offs? It feels difficult to argue this when it feels like the majority of companies don't do any user research in the first place. User researchers and continuous discovery can co-exist.
Contact Hope
You can catch up with Hope at Fearless Product or follow her on LinkedIn.

Related episodes you should like:

Data-Informed Decision Making and the Three Cs of Product Management (Roger Snyder, VP of Products & Services @ 280 Group)
Adventures in Product Management (Dan Olsen, Author "The Lean Product Playbook")
Getting into the Habit of Continuous Discovery (Teresa Torres, Author "Continuous Discovery Habits")
Build High Growth Products by Following the Product Science Success Path (Holly Hester-Reilly, Founder @ H2R Product Science)
Selling Product Thinking by Influencing Companies at the Right Time (Anthony Marter, Product Coach)
Putting Customers at the Heart of your Product Decisions (Hubert Palan, Founder @ Productboard)
Servitising Product Management & Setting Up Product Teams For Success (Jas Shah, Product Consultant)
Build What Matters with Vision-Led Product Management (Rajesh Nerlikar, Author "Build What Matters")